OK guys, unfortunately we were not able to get a beta iOS build out due to some performance and framerate or something issues (and time), but in the meantime, here’s a beta WEB build 🙂 It’s hosted on a different location than the previous one so do take note:

1. All the spiffy pretty day/night cycle stuff
2. Zombie head juice
3. Misc communicative juice
4. The swing is WAY faster
5. The game’s harder with the inclusion of… Something. You’ll see. But not much yet 😉
6. Delays and things work properly now
7. Basic instructions!
8. You’ll notice… decorative elements 🙂 They’ll be earned and have certain effects come the final game.
9. Various other things.
10. Player will use the bat unless there’s something to shoot, where it’ll attempt to use the gun.
11. Bat-spam removed.

Known issues:

1. Difficulty ramp is still to be tweaked, will get harder, at the same time give the shotgun a better reason to exist, hopefully. I’d talk about it but it feels like it’s better tested than talked about.
2. Pause causes crash in one scenario. Don’t find it 😉
3. Achievements still need to be added.
4. Sharing to be implemented (only works from iOS)
We’re almost there! Last mile is always the hardest, really… Thanks for all your input!

Enjoy the beta! 😀

One last thing:

As we’re nearing the finish line (last 90% of time spent on the 10% of the stuff), we want to ask you guys’ honest opinion on monetisation. Should this be a $0.99 paid app or a free with ads?

The original plan was to make something quick and toss it out as free with ads as an experiment. But with research and reading I find that there are two points of views to this all:

1. These days free apps fall into two categories – crazy IAP things or throwaway Flappy clones. That means the perception of free apps fall under those two categories too. The original intent with free with ads was never to “mint it”, but more to try and reach a big audience and gauge response. But if the impression of free apps are poor, then even before it gets into people’s handsets it’s already gonna be labelled as being an unworthy game. Thoughts on this?

2. If going as a paid app, we’ll drop the ads naturally, but the barrier to entry is higher. Even though a dollar is not a lot at all, we’re now competing against other dollar games like Cut the Rope, PVZ (even if IAP infested), Bad Piggies, etc, which obviously out-trump us. Obviously the app store doesn’t work like that, with only the top games getting all the attention, but is it worth trying to play in that arena with such a delicately small offering? I do think that going paid ups the perceived value of the game and may get it more attention than if it were free.

Overall, rather than a money-making exercise, this is more about learning how the market works, an experiment with real results, however it goes. We’d rather maximise it one way or another (exposure mostly), so it would be great if you could help us with valuable insights!

In the last week, we’ve been polishing the crap out of Dead Run, with a long list of stuff to be implemented, including lots of juice, adding more challenges, tweaking gameplay balance, and longevity in terms of achievements and such. The build is currently not table enough for a beta release, but it’s getting there – but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of what we’ve been putting in!

It’s not a Flappy Clone

One day, myself and Loet was working on Rocketto, and we got pretty tired. It was taking so long. So we started talking all sorts of rubbish, which naturally included Flappy Bird. (just kidding, we actually like Flappy quite a bit as a well-polished focussed piece of entertainment with some good hooks)

So, inspired by the Flappy Bird story, we decided to take a break from our usual project and spend two weeks to create something with minimal scope, hyper-focussed, with enough time to polish the crap out of it, with the goal of releasing.

An alpha build in 2 weeks: Dead Run.

The game is an endless runner, with a single input: attack.

You’ll come across zombies. Kill them or you get munched.

You’ll also come across other survivors. Kill them and you lose, don’t kill them to rescue them, and they’ll join your party.

How many survivors can you save?

The razor-sharp focus and concentration needed for something this simple is actually unnerving, even I still get tense further into the game 🙂

Learning by doing

This two-week exercise was super valuable in what it takes to finish a game.

One of the most important things we learnt was that keeping scope down is very important for a limited project. Everyone has great ideas, but ideas do many things: 1) Needs time to be created 2) Has implications on other things, especially game balance 3) Needs to be re-tested by more/other people.

Finish and polish is super important to create a good impression when you’re aiming for a public release. A good balance needs to be struck between good game and good juice/polish. They’re at least 50/50 in terms of importance.

Must. Show. Other. People. ASAP. This cannot be stressed enough, the sooner you show other people the sooner you’ll discover things that may be wrong with the game (no matter how good you are you cannot anticipate everyone’s understanding of your baby, and that’s really important), and the more time you have to fix them, and the less backtracking and useless work you’ll do.

Be ready to fail on any idea. Don’t hang on too hard to things that appears to be not working when tested against real people who are not you.

Spit and shine

The idea was to create a game in two weeks, then polish it up in the last and release, as a hyper-focussed exercise to learn from. So far we’ve got a few things that we still need to do on it to make it as juicy and crunchy as we want it to be before setting it out into the wild, but we’re pretty much on schedule, which is super damn exciting!